Posts tagged Genetics

"DNA origami" is nothing new -- in fact, IBM once considered it as a way to make microchips. However, Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have become ridiculously good at folding the building blocks of life, and built a bunny to prove it. The point was not to do a party trick, of cour...

The Brazilian city of Piracicaba has a potent new weapon in the ongoing fight against Dengue Fever, which infects more than a million people annually: genetically modified mosquito lotharios Created by Oxitec of Abingdon, UK and bred locally within Brazil, these GM mosquitoes (all of which are mal...

In what is being called the "most comprehensive" study of its kind, a team from the University of Chicago claims that it has revealed the massive amount of genetic change needed for woolly mammoths to adapt to their arctic environment. The study, which was published on July 2 in Cell Reports, show...

Gene sequencing, once a rare feat, is pretty common these days... but how do you know that your DNA data is up to snuff? As of now, there's an easy way to find out. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released reference genetic material that serves as a "measuring stick"...

How do scientists study the evolutionary transformation from snouts to beaks as those winged dinosaurs became birds? By putting dinosaur snouts on chickens, of course. A team of researchers at Yale were able to modify the chickens' genetic make up in a way that would make then grow a snout like th...

Now that Apple has launched a platform for medical research, it's apparently ready to expand what that platform can do. MIT's sources understand that the Cupertino crew is working with academics on ResearchKit apps that let iPhone users get DNA tests. Apple wouldn't directly scoop up DNA, as you m...

Researchers from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China made headlines late last month upon announcing that they had successfully edited the genes of a human embryo. This revelation set off a firestorm of controversy as the scientific community took sides in the ethical debate of genetic manip...

Believe it or not, police have a real problem with identifying suspects who are identical twins -- unless you're willing to spend a month sequencing genes, DNA samples are all but useless. They may be far more effective in the future, though, as British researchers have developed a technique that...

For the first time in history, a team of researchers have successfully edited the genes of a human embryo. The researchers from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou reportedly used the CRISPR/Cas9 technique to knock a gene called HBB, which causes the fatal blood disorder &beta;-thalassaemia, out o...

A team at Stanford's School of Medicine has reportedly uncovered a potent new treatment method for combating one of leukemia's most aggressive forms -- and they did it pretty much by accident. While survival rates for B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a particularly nasty form of white blood ce...

For over a year now, 23andMe has been effectively banned from offering its US customers health-related genetic tests. The company is still selling its personal DNA kits, but the information it can provide is limited to ancestry-related reports and raw genetic data. The US Food and Drug Administrat...

No, you're not looking at a dessert gone horribly wrong -- that might just be the future of synthetic organ transplants. Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a genetic "glue" that forms gels useful for 3D printing organic tissues. The key is using custom-designed, complem...